No, you didn’t read that wrong. Organizational culture doesn’t exist and I’ll tell you why: The leadership expects the board to tell them what culture to follow. The Values, the Mission, the Vision, the Manifesto, the Purpose, the Massive Transformative Purpose, the Agreements, the Agreements, the Essence, anything that can be put into words – after all, as humans, we put ourselves into the world through language, right?

Also. But we place ourselves in the world, first and foremost, through feeling.

The team expects the leadership to welcome, understand, listen, guide, make decisions, but without setting too many limits. Soft Economy,Soft Skills, Soft Approach, Soft-anything that softens the hardship of performing every day – even in pain, even with no money, even with a marriage hanging by a thread, even with children screaming in the background, even with a country (and a planet) on the brink of collapse.

And if this company has an “owner” figure, then it’s all over: we expect him, or her, or them to point the rudder somewhere, preferably without too many waves, more stable, where we can breathe a sigh of relief (and have a few laughs, if possible, over Zoom or Meet or Teams or Nearby or Gather or FaceTime or our beloved Whatsapp).

Everyone is right to expect something from someone who is “on top”.

And everyone else is wrong, too.

Because if we dive a little deeper, just think: the culture of a place is the sum of all the things we do with ourselves and with the people in that place. Which, increasingly, is a virtualized place, without a table, without a chair, without the obligation of 3D coexistence (the one that even smells, remember?).

So there’s no point in management saying that the culture here is collaborative (Collab, Agile, Hands-on) if you don’t collaborate. There’s no point in saying that we solve our problems through dialog if no one has the ability to talk without killing themselves. Or if we raise the banner of diversity and mental health, but everyone is white, CIS, straight, non-disabled, young, working 16 hours a day and taking black label medication.

Social statistics are corporate statistics.

Where are the 18 million anxious people that the World Health Organization attributes to Brazil?

Building the company culture, right next to you.

What the hell is organizational culture, then?

– a reflection of the prevailing culture in society;

– the result of your posture in the world;

– the product of the relationships established in that context (especially when resolving conflicts).

It’s that semiotic concept that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

It has its own life, its own personality, its own voice.

If your company were a person: what would it be like, in detail?

There’s your culture.

Ana Tomazelli is a Culture Strategist at Scooto. A human resources executive for over 20 years, she has led HR restructurings in Brazil and abroad. Having worked for the startup B2Mamy, as well as traditional and consolidated companies such as UHG-Amil, Solera Holdings, KPMG and Diagnósticos da América S/A (Delboni, Lavoisier), Ana is also the founder of Ipefem – Instituto de Pesquisas & Estudos do Feminino e das Existências Múltiplas, an NGO providing mental health education for women in the job market. Psychoanalyst and Journalist from Laureate – Anhembi Morumbi, postgraduate in Human Resources from FIA-USP and in Business from IBMEC-RJ. She is the mother of Raphael, 23, and Guilherme, 13, her main achievements.